of stages has broken down’.92 The way in which gay men and lesbians form their families represents the break-down in the history of the heterosexual family. For example, Cheshire Calhoun contends that lesbians are uniquely positioned to violate the conventional gender expectation that they, as women, would be dependent on men in their personal relations, would fulfil the maternal imperative, would service a husband and children, and would accept the confinement to the private sphere of domesticity.93
By avoiding heterosexual and conventional gender relations, gay men and lesbians create ways in which the perpetuation of sexism and the gender role system are avoided, being replaced instead by alternative and liberated lifestyles. Gay men and lesbians have also illustrated that family composition can be determined by choice rather than being imposed by biology or dominant ideology. This has developed the idea that families can exist in a variety of forms and ←51 | 52→purpose, depending on the demands of the individual. The struggles of gay men and lesbians, therefore, represent a transition from the dominant family ideology to a new phase, one characterised by the ‘chosen family’. This concept contrasts with the compulsory heterosexual nature of the family. In a chosen family, human biology does not determine the ordering of parental and sexual relationships. This family promotes the idea that human sexuality ‘is a choice, and [humans] are not destined to a particular fate because of [their] chromosomes’.94 For example, women do not have to be mothers—or primary carers—just because they are born female, and being male does not privilege men to be relatively free from parental responsibilities. Instead, the idea of parenthood is equally shared by both parties in a non-hierarchical manner. This, in return, creates ways in which children are raised free from gender constraints. For Kath Weston, ‘familial ties between the same sexes, [which] are not grounded in biology or procreation, do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage’.95 Therefore, prevailing family ideology and gender roles are not transferred across generations.
The chosen family replaces traditional family arrangements, such as heterosexual marriage, gendered parenthood, and biological kinship, and introduces non-normative arrangements such as same-sex marriage, same-sex parenting, and non-biological kinship. In deciding whether or not to have children, gay men and lesbians have challenged the family ideology that promotes having children and raising them within a heteronormative family, in line with gender roles. These non-normative arrangements initially incurred a backlash, as they were considered to be deviant and a threat to social stability. However, the struggles of gay men and lesbians to receive equal rights in the public domain have paved the way for chosen families to be gradually recognised and legalised.96 Gay men and lesbians have put into practice the long feminist fight against gender oppression by establishing non-normative family arrangements and celebrating sexual diversity.
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The New Right and After: The ‘Pretended’ or Alternative Families
Feminist and gay challenges to the traditional family have not passed without resistance. During the 1980s, stable families were part of the New Right’s policy and its vision of a stable society. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) declared that ‘a nation of free people will only continue to be a great nation if your family life continues and the structure of that nation is a family structure’.97 This conservative notion of the family structure reinforced a sharp distinction between private and public spheres in which women and men were successively situated. This distinction was sustained through ‘stable’ families, which in Diana Gittins’ view ‘shaped the ways in which government policies were perceived and regulated’.98
The period in which the New Right came to power was marked by changes in the way families were perceived and formed. In particular, traditional family values were challenged by the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement, radical feminists’ attack on family values, easier access to divorce and cohabitation, advanced birth control methods, and technologically assisted reproduction. Thus, the claim that the nuclear family is a natural and unchanging unit came under scrutiny. The New Right was alarmed by these changes and declared that the family was in a state of crisis, one that was likely to cause wider social problems. Rather than acknowledging underlying causes of social problems in the economy, education, and health sector, the New Right pointed to the family as the site where social problems could be solved. For example, Thatcher stated, ‘You have to accept that these problems will occur, but it is best to have them solved within the family structure and you are denying the solution unless the family structure continues’.99 According to the Tories, individuals were threatened with social instability if they were not part of a family. Under the New Right, the family once more functioned as a disciplinary institution where women and ←53 | 54→children could be controlled by men in an attempt to avoid social problems such as AIDS.
In the 1980s, the New Right defended their notion of ‘family values’ by actively discouraging homosexuality through the education system. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) prohibited the endorsement of homosexuality, stipulating that ‘a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.100 Homosexual parents and their children were reconfigured as a ‘pretended family’, a stance that dismissed of possibility of an alternative family. Cheshire Calhoun explains the ideological motif behind targeting a specific group and accusing them of destroying family values:
In periods where there was heightened anxiety about the stability of the heterosexual nuclear family because of changes in gender, sexual, and family composition norms within the family, this anxiety was resolved by targeting a group of persons who could be ideologically constructed as outsiders to the family.101
The New Right was unsettled by homosexuality not because it was a threat to the well-being of families and individuals, but rather because, in their view, it had the potential to dissolve the traditional family ideology that structures social, economic, and governmental systems. Thatcher declared that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’.102 Her emphasis on ‘individual men and women’ hints at their roles in the gendered system of family required for social stability. Homosexuality was seen as a danger to the gendered roles of individual men and women, in part because gay men were perceived to be ‘feminine’ and lesbians as ‘masculine’, thus subverting preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity.
In 1991, the New Right’s insistence on a single form and meaning of the family was opposed by the Labour Party, when Labour MP Harriet Harman called for recognition of alternative families in family and public policies:
Family policy needs to recognise that families come in all shapes and sizes… to claim one kind of family is right and others wrong can do considerable harm by stigmatizing ←54 | 55→those who live in a non-traditional family setting. Public policy cannot alter private choices, but it can mitigate the painful effects of change.103
Harman maintained that the formation of a family depends on individual choices. The state’s responsibility, for her, was to support these choices rather than impose a monolithic form of the family that disregarded individuality and variety. Her speech also acknowledged the stigmatisation of individuals who live outside the traditional family arrangements. Harman’s emphasis on choice as a criterion for family formation was key to countering this stigmatisation and introducing further legal steps for chosen families.
The years 1994 and 2000 witnessed developments in the rights of chosen families. The legal age of consent for men engaging in homosexual acts, previously set as 21 in 1967, was lowered to 18 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and finally to 16 by the amendment to the Civil Partnership Act 2000. The equalisation of the age of consent illustrated that chosen families started to gain the
